Will the Bebo buy back beguile or bore us?

Summary:Sell a company for $850 million, buy it back for $1 million five years later. That is a really good way to make some serious money. And that is just what Michael Birch, the owner, founder and shareholder of Bebo has done this week.

"Never say never, but I can probably rule out buying it back. Bebo was my life when I was running it and I don't want that again.

The guys there approached me, the CTO is a good friend of mine and I have a lot of ideas I'm still excited about -- but I don't see any scenario where I'd buy it back.”

Birch did not like managing Bebo when it grew and became a large organisation: "When it became fairly political internally… it just stopped being fun." he said in an interview with the BBC in 2011.

So will Birch succeed with the re-invention of Bebo? He certainly has a great pedigree for innovation and creating new start-ups.

He founded BirthdayAlarm.com in 2001 after the dotcom crash. Birthday Alarm grew to two million members by 2002. His next venture Ringo.com attracted 400,000 users before being sold in 2003.

Birch has invested in start-ups as diverse as Slice, Friend.ly, Mixpanel and Pinterest. He seems to know when to buy in to a success story and more importantly to get out of a failing venture just in time.

Eileen Brown is a social business consultant who has been working with collaborative technologies for 20 years. Eileen creates the social business, energises communities and ignites social commerce and social CRM. She develops social business strategy, customer reach and online branding. Her book, Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketi...
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Disclosure

Eileen Brown is an independent consultant who works for Amastra. Her opinions are her own. She worked at Microsoft from 2001 to 2009. She has no other affiliation to any of the companies that she mentions here.